John Thomas
In which I read and watch some things and am inexplicably freaked out by a Madonna concert video
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
A very simple story with meaningful symbolism - the depth and darkness of the Northern mine is also the depth and darkness of the vagina. Men die in one and are born from the other. This literal effect, along with Lawrence’s masterful descriptions of nature, are undermined by the pace of this novel, which does not work. Its sexual language (notably put on trial) is actually still shocking - more because it is infantile than because it is vulgar.
The Prowler (1951)
An early film by Joseph Losey, a director I love for his output of surreal and more-obviously-gay films (Secret Ceremony, Boom!, Modesty Blaise, Accident, The Servant). The signature odd angles and mirrors and eccentricities are not really here - this is male-manipulator studio fare along the lines of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt. The real visual standouts are the desert scenes at the end, which feel wonderfully sparse.
Madonna
This week I finally decided to explore the life and work of Madonna, who has been my cultural blindspot for the entire time I have been alive. I once thought it was a curse that my parents absolutely never listened to pop music at home (forcing me into ‘80s oblivion, alienating me from peers properly schooled in the language of synth) but now I know that my lack of knowledge was my strength all along. Nostalgia is a stagnant obstacle to free inquiry, criticism and potency. And boy, is the Madonna canon potent!
Madonna is often credited for bringing to the pop mainstream the sort of in-your-face explicitness third wave feminists call ‘embracing your sexuality’. As a second-wave feminist, I would have abhorred her specifically for this - an entire music industry is now seemingly built around stripping down and exploiting perpetually young women. I now find that it is one thing to court male horniness for money and clicks, and another to almost mine for horniness the way Madonna does, also for money but possibly for art. Her sexual stage presence is not reliant on the invasive quality of pornography - it is terrifying and conflicting. I would not call her work an ‘embrace’ of sexuality, but rather a semi-conscious reordering of it at the Freudian level.
The artist semi-regularly references Marlene Dietrich. I am not too sure where Marlene ends and Madonna begins - they share the same public mystique, a mixture of European frost and pure Apollonian executive function. If they were characters in D.H Lawrence’s Women in Love then they would come in near the end, in a sleigh. Dietrich was (is?) a sort of false fertility goddess, an embodiment of sex in the public mind lacking only the actual act or suggestion of intercourse. Madonna is the same. When she mimes masturbation, it has absolutely nothing to do with masturbation the act but rather masturbation the communal puddle of meaning, or nervous bundle of associations. The full meaning of ‘fertility’ is undermined in both cases by Maria Riva’s abuse memoir Meine Mutter Marlene and by the constant press outrage about Madonna’s adopted Malawian children.
I am a technically-secular person - so why did I watch the first half-hour of Madonna’s 1990 Blonde Ambition concert video and experience a Catholic level of fear and shock afterwards? My first thought was that I had automatically associated the late eighties and early nineties with the horrifying Hillsborough disaster, and that any contemporary attempt to summon a similar level of love-sex-death drama in front of (key) a bursting crowd would only bring back all those same anxieties. I have not discounted this theory. I happen to feel perfectly comfortable commuting with the dead and abused celebrities of Old Hollywood, but stranded and scared in the wasteland of the eighties-nineties transition - clown makeup, circus-synth music, voices and faces which are almost real and ‘modern’ but still faded and distorted in technology’s liminal space.
It is one thing to watch a woman gyrate on a velvet bed and another thing completely when the whole scene is lit up in a fluorescent blue-green-red, when she is wearing a piece of belted conical corsetry that looks almost like human skin, and when her song is played on spidery sitar. The transition to a simulated church (for Like a Prayer) was the last straw. I spent the next day grappling with the religious implications of what I had seen, uneasily concluding that a truly benevolent god would want free artistic expression for women and still pondering the possibility of conversion in the process. For the first time in my adult life, I felt the need to self-soothe by returning to the present, watching 2010s television for comfort. I had not been so affected by a piece of art since 2009, when a Christmas TV showing of The Wizard of Oz brought me to dread the scope of the human eye (manifested as the Hollywood camera, disguised as fear of the witch). Other female pop stars will attempt to pull off similar provocations, and they will fail - it takes someone who is truly ageless and androgynous (charismatic). I hoped that it would help to write all this down, but it barely has. The best option is to look to the future and keep waiting for this anxiety to go away.
I will end this on a calming and positive note. Ray of Light is one of the best albums I have ever heard - spiritually soothing, beautiful, consistent (I’ve linked Frozen, which explicitly capitalises on the Dietrich-Snow Queen Apollonian persona but in a medieval and almost optimistic way). I appreciate the late-90s to early-00s transition in Madonna’s discography and personality. I also like that she has written children’s books.